This week in Brexitland, October 12, 2023

There is one thing, more than anything else, that the campaign to rejoin the EU must distance itself from at all costs: proportional representation

This week at Labour conference, a protestor got on stage and approached Keir Starmer near the start of the leader’s speech. Strangely enough, the protestor sprinkled glitter onto Sir Keir (I still have no idea why) before starting to shout about his cause. It wasn’t the Palestinians or nationalisation of industry the man began to bellow about, but proportional representation. For someone outside of the Westminster bubble, it must have seemed like gobbledygook. However, only a few words in, I recognised exactly what he was on about and wanted to hide behind a sofa, so deep was the cringe cutting into me.

The fight for a more proportional system of voting has become an obsession amongst a certain political type over the last few years. I was at an event this summer where Sayeeda Warsi spoke and after her speech (which was great), the first question from the crowd was about what she thought about proportional representation. The Tory Baroness answered that while she could see that there are good things about it, she wasn’t convinced the UK switching to a PR voting system was a good idea. Wouldn’t it help Nigel Farage more than anyone else? Then she took another question. Which was about PR again. A few questions later, another one about voting systems came up, even though Warsi had given her views on the topic several times already.

Why is a certain type of activist on the left so obsessed with changing the voting system? Part of it comes down to the fact that a bunch of people who had been loudly campaigning against the UK leaving the European Union shifted loudly to advocating for a change in the voting system after we did indeed leave the EU. It’s like all of the energy went from Europe into PR. This was a mistake, one we are still paying for.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time here debating the pros and cons of PR. Yes, it might foster a more consensual politics; it might also let a lot of extremist tosspots into government at a time when there are quite a lot of extremist tosspots floating about. For instance, I agree with Baroness Warsi on the point around Farage - if we moved to a PR system, he is someone who would instantly benefit. That isn’t an open and shut case against PR by any means, but it seems to me something that PR supporters never want to deal with. They insist that PR means the end of right-leaning governments forever, neatly sidestepping the fact that most continental countries have a PR system - and a right-wing government.

No, whatever proportional representation has going for it, if you want the UK to have any chance of rejoining the EU in your lifetime, the campaign for it has to be kept a thousand miles away from proportional representation, preferably with a 200-metre thick lead wall encased around it, separating the two. Here’s why.

For a start, the incoming Labour government are going to be guarded against anything they put in a box labelled “thing we don’t like that can hurt us from the left”. There will be a lot of things in this box. One of them will definitely be PR. You see, Labour people in senior positions know that proportional representation would be bad for the Labour Party. Really bad. As in, death of the party forever bad. If there was a proportional voting system at Westminster, the different factions within the Labour big tent would have the freedom to splinter off and start their own parties, confident that they wouldn’t face electoral annihilation for it.

Rejoining the EU as an issue has to be kept out of the box. This means not associating with other things that are definitely inside the box, which shouldn’t be difficult as our relationship with Europe has little to do with any of those things anyhow. If you want to tie rejoin together with PR as a campaign double act, that means consigning rejoin to oblivion, at least so long as Labour are in power.

As for the Tories, well, they hate PR even more than Labour. They are certain that it would be bad for them - I’ve never been convinced that this is the case. In fact, if a PR voting system were introduced for House of Commons elections, I feel confident that the Tories would be the party least badly affected. They might have to share power a lot of the time with either a party fully to their right, like UKIP or the Brexit Party, or with a centre-right liberal party. In fact, under PR, this would probably be the most common form of government.

So, if we want more people from the centre-right to embrace rejoin and even feel confident speaking about it in public, it has to be kept entirely separate from any campaign to change the voting system.

If you like PR, great, campaign for it separately. But I say this to those who are invested in rejoining the EU coming back into political vogue anytime soon: association with proportional representation would be the kiss of death to it all.

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